Objective

The objective of the EU-wide project “Biodiversity in Standards and Labels for the Food Industry” is to improve the biodiversity performance of standards and labels within the food industry by a) supporting standard-setting organizations to include efficient biodiversity criteria into their schemes; and b) motivating food processing companies and retailers to include biodiversity criteria into their sourcing guidelines.

This is achieved through

Trainings for certifiers and auditors as well as the responsible personnel in companies.

Development and implementation of a universal monitoring system for biodiversity.

Dissemination of results and information to the food sector and standard-setting organizations.

A European-wide initiative on “Biodiversity in Standards and Labels of the Food Sector” will continue working on the topic even after this project ends in 2020.

Actions and means involved

Forty standards and food labels will be evaluated for their biodiversity criteria and a baseline report and recommendations for the improvement of the criteria will be published. Interested standards organizations and companies will be advised in the revision of their criteria.

With the help of a newly developed Biodiversity Performance Tool (BPT), the current situation and the further development for biodiversity protection on farms will be analyzed. Through a pilot project involving farms in cereal cultivation (Germany), tomato cultivation (Spain), olive production (Spain), in grasslands used for meat production (Portugal) and grasslands used for milk production and dairy products (France), the BPT will be tested. The final version of the BPT will be made available for certifiers, assessors and product managers. They will also be involved in a training program on biodiversity.

Finally, a monitoring-system and database tracking the biodiversity performance at farm level will be set up. Using this database, standard-setting organizations and companies will be able to monitor the positive effects and improve upon their criteria and measures.